Merry Christmas Part One - The Christmas Tomato

I'd love to make this a yearly tradition, but the timing might be tricky to duplicate next year. Tomatoe plants just go so nicely with Christmas ornaments!

Our potted tomatoes actually did quite poorly this summer - I think we might have gotten 2 or 3 tomatoes from them all year. We brought in the plants when it got cold this fall - there were still a few tiny little tomatoes on the plants that we thought might eventually grow and ripen if we brought the plants inside.

They started turning red the week before Christmas and are now perfectly ready to eat in our leftover turkey sandwiches. Brilliant!

Merry Christmas Part Two - Tourtière

Apparently, it is a French Canadian tradition to serve Tourtière on Christmas eve. I am not French Canadian, but I love tourtière, and I happened to have a lot of ground pork in my freezer. And anyway...what goes better with a turkey dinner than MEAT pie?

So...this is the method. You get your ground pork (Berkshire pork from Clearwater, MB in my case), you cook it up with some water, onions, garlic and lots of ground cloves, sage and savoury. Mix it up with mashed potatoes and stick it in some lardy pastry. Bake until lovely and enjoy with friends and family.

Fried Potatoes

Today is Gray Cup Sunday, the pinnacle of the Canadian Football League season, and I'm not at a party celebrating. This is by choice. I am not interested in football. I find football dull and difficult to pay attention to. There's something about the day that deserves a party, though.

Several years ago, after fostering an anti-Gray Cup party tradition, some friends sadly informed us they would no longer be available to celebrate the day with us in our particular fashion because the desire to actually watch the game had stolen upon them. This was not particularly sad, just somewhat puzzling. These days we celebrate the day by grocery shopping in an empty store.

I don't know what it is about Gray Cup Sunday, but I had this wicked craving today for hot wings and potato chips today. Sitting around the living room watching-the-game-food. Even though I held strong through all the grocery aisles, my passion for salty crispiness did not abate when we got home.

So I made me some potato chips. And ate them as I watched The Simpsons, avoiding the big game one channel over.

Planet Pumpkin

I've been living in pumpkin land for the past couple of weeks.

We got several pumpkins this year from our CSA, like every year. This year however, we actually wanted to eat them before they rotted away. A noble goal, yes?
We got through the first little pumpkin quickly with Creamy Pumpkin pasta and Liberian Pumpkin Stew from the Simply in Season book. Pretty tasty.

Even our giant Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin was saved for food this Hallowe'en - we used an LED light inside the lantern instead of candles so it wouldn't get charred and nasty on the inside. After its life as a Jack-O-Lantern was complete, we roasted it whole until it was nice and soft. It ultimately gave us four litres of cooked pumpkin to deal with.

So this weekend - I dealt with it.

Pumpkin and kidney bean enchiladas...

Pumpkin Crumble....

And pumpkin bread.

And there is more pumpkin pie filling and pumpkin enchilada sauce in the freezer for later squash adventures.

So as a celebration, and as reward for our hard work using up our pumpkin in such ingenious ways, we celebrated with some fantastic Sargent Sundae soft serve pumpkin pie ice cream.

BEST SOFT SERVE IN TOWN!

Home Canning Season, 2007

As I posted earlier in July, we made the commitment this year to eat locally all summer while the produce was fresh and in season. At some point we also made the decision to stock up on all the beautiful, fresh, local stuff and try to save some of it for the winter. (This decision came shortly after we noticed that the pickles we were buying were grown in India, and the tomatoes we depended on all winter were from California...) Our Wiens Farm CSA share gave us our veggies for the week, but we also made it out to the St. Norbert Farmer's Market almost every Saturday morning this summer to supplement the frenzy to 'put food by'.

And yes, it became a frenzy. Lots of food made its way into the freezer, which is currently full of kale, swiss chard, beet greens, corn, strawberries, freezer jam, gooseberries, raspberries, apples, and sorrel, but the most time intensive effort was devoted to canning preserves.

The diced zucchini, peppers and onions pictured above were diced by hand. As was everything else processed in my house. I don't know why I keep resisting a food processor - I'm paranoid that everything is going to be sliced down to mush, I think. If you're going to make everything from scratch, let it have some character! Yay for chunks!

My kitchen was continuously filthy. Simmering pots on the stove for hours and hours at a time... boiling pots of water going for hours and hours at a time...
All I can say is, thank God August wasn't as hot as July was this year. This project would definitely not have come to fruition if it that 30+ heatwave would have continued.

Slowly but surely, the little batches of tasty things collected up...

In the end, this was the approximate final tally:

• 2 pints zucchini and pepper relish
• 4 pints curry pickles
• 3 pints bread and butter pickles
• 4 pints pickled baby carrots with oregano
• 4 pints pickled cauliflower
• 8 pints baby dills
• 3 quarts big dills
• 12 pints tomato salsa
• 10 quarts diced tomatoes
• 10 quarts tomato sauce
• 9 pints carrot ikra
• 10.5 pints green tomato chow (all from Stiles Street tomatoes!)
• 1 quart apple cider
  

I'll keep ya'll posted to see how long all this stuff lasts us!

Pembina Valley Manitou Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival

Please welcome our second ever guest writer to Planet Borscht - Ms. K - an individual who truly knows the Manitoba food scene in and out.

I am delighted to be a guest blogger here at Planet Borscht....
home of down home Manitoba food culture!

September 7th found us flocking to Manitou for the Pembina Valley Manitou Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival.

The festival featured a Pancake Breakfast, Craft Show and Sale, Farmer’s Market, Display Booths, Honey, Garlic & Maple Syrup Vendors, Free Stage Entertainment, Cooking Demos, Historic Town Tours, Soap Box Derby, Gourmet Alley, Beverage Gardens, all topped off with a delicious Buffet Supper. The highlight of the day was the soapbox derby. Below is a video to give you a taste of the action!

There was even transportation to tour one throughout the town! An enterprising Manitouarian was holding a garage sale and we missed out on purchasing a nearly new 1950's accordian for $50!

The evening was lovely with a Deadwood Saloon in the arena and an excellent dinner.

In the realm of fall suppers the dinner was something of a gourmet meal and well worth the $17. Here is the visuals on the dinner..our eyes were much much bigger than our stomachs and I regret to inform you we wasted some of this lovely food

Veggie option

Meat Option

The buffet featured

• Plain or garlic roast beef


• Honey lemon crusted chicken


• Dry roasted garlic pork ribs with wild cranberry jelly


• Honey mustard glazed farmer sausage


• Garlic mashed potatoes


• Herb sauteed mushrooms


• Orange honey glazed carrots with fresh dill


• Manitoba maple syrup baked beans


• Tomato salad with basil garlic dressing


• Honey coleslaw


• Cucumber onion salad


• Dinner rolls


• Roasted garlic in olive oil and herbs (my favorite)
  


• Pembina valley apple crisp with manitoba maple syrup

In closing here is a clip from the Deadwood Saloon compete with saloon piano player

We give the Pembina Valley Honey Garlic and Maple Syrup Festival 4.85 stars out of 5!

MCC Relief Sale, Morris MB

The MCC Relief Sale in Morris, MB is the ultimate kick-off to Autumn each year.
MCC puts on this combination of farmer's market, craft sale, bake sale, flea market, auction and fall supper every September as a fundraiser for food, water, and other missions projects for the Mennonite Central Committee.

You can find hand-knit winter mittens, cottage cheese vareneki, damson plum jam, giant homegrown watermelons and Manitoba apple cider and quilts and antiques... and so many other exciting things.

Then you can eat yourself into a stupor! What more can you ask for?

The jam table and the mittens table. The jam went pretty fast this year, but the mittens were plentiful. The fresh produce and food tent.
It's a little different from a farmer's market in that you don't actually get to talk to the people that grow or produce the food - it's completely run by volunteers. Some of the food is produced by large companies - farmer sausage is donated from Winkler Sausage and the noodles are donated by a local pasta company. But most of the produce comes from regular folks' gardens.

Noodles and apples.

The food is cheap as borscht....

And so tasty at 10:30 in the morning!

This is the booty from this year's trip. 4 liters apple cider, 4 dozen frozen cottage cheese vereneki, a link of Winkler's liver sausage, a bag of windmill ground rye flour, four jars of jam, two pairs of mittens, 9 pounds of tomatoes, 5 pounds of apples, a head of romaine lettuce, a giant watermelon, 3 green peppers, 2 big onions and two dozen eggs.

Everything is cheap, locally produced, and all proceeds went to the MCC.

For more info on MCC Relief Sales, check out this link: http://mcc.org/manitoba/morrisreliefsale/

The Camping Gourmet

Yes, that's right. Canned lobster. The Camping Gourmet's best new friend.

Jeff brought a frozen can of lobster home from his last trip to Nova Scotia (mostly to keep the fresh scallops cold). Normally I'd kind of question frozen lobster, but when you're camping with no refrigeration, frozen canned lobster is brilliant! We packed it in the cooler Friday morning, and was thawed out but still cold for Saturday night supper.

There were about three tails and four big claws in the can - altogether about two and a half small lobsters worth of meat. It's pre-cooked and soaked in brine. Surprising not rubbery.

We fried it up with some butter and pesto, added some tomatoes, and finished it off with white wine and cream.
Yum. Couscous with zucchini and green peppers rounded out the meal. This meal topped the time we had grilled octopus in Pacific Rim on the camp stove. Best anniversary meal yet!



This was the site of our elegant repast. We were camped next to some yahoos in the campground, so we thought this abandoned park trailhead called Forester's Footsteps would at least be quiet.

Those Foresters sure were rough on their playground equipment.

Romantic Dinner, here we come!

Beet Salad

The Bounty of the Harvest

Food from the St. Norbert Farmer's Market

I've just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life" and found it very inspiring. In her book, Kingsolver and her family have committed to eating locally for a year. This involves raising their own turkeys and chickens for meat and eggs, growing huge vegetable gardens, and even making her own cheese. It helps that she's living in a rural, agricultural area in a moderately temperate climate that makes this type of living feasible, but there are a lot of ideas in it that are pretty viable, even for an urban dweller living in a part of the world where winter lasts for 6 months.

The idea of primarily eating food grown in our own community is an goal that we've been moving closer towards for a few years. We've been members of the Wiens Shared Farm, a CSA based out of St. Adolphe for about four years or so and have really enjoyed eating food in season. We've also been buying a majority of our meat in the last year direct from local sources - organic pork from La Broquerie, chickens from New Bothwell, and the odd package of grass fed beef from those who bought a quarter and didn't have the storage space to keep it all.

This year, the Hundred-Mile-Diet is getting a lot of buzz in the media. There are groups being formed here in Manitoba that are promising to stick to a rigid 'locavore' diet for 100 days this autumn. I like the idea of food challenges, and this one sounds interesting, but the idea of forgoing coffee or the odd citrus fruit for 3 1/2 months will make me say no thanks to the 100 day promise. Instead, I'm doing what I can now to buy my food from farmers markets to supplement our CSA share (very wet fields this year - lots of kale, green onions and lettuce so far) and I've decided to plant peas, beans, tomatoes and herbs in my front yard this year instead of begonias and petunias.

My front steps garden - tomatoes, green beans and peas.

My herb garden - thyme, oregano, basil, sage, chives, sorrel, and some more green beans.

Check out http://100milemanitoba.org/ for links to lots of local Manitoba food producers.

Warning! Lewd Content!

We've been making our own sausages for about four years now. I'd always liked Italian grocer's fresh lean sausage and it seemed like it would be easy to make. Simple as that.

This is how you make sausage:
Take meat, grind it if it needs to be ground, add spices and then stuff into casings. Then you're done. This time around we started with pre-ground organic pork from La Broquerie. We made two flavours - a spicy Italian with lots of red pepper flakes, fennel and sambuca, and a chipotle pepper fresh chorizo style sausage. Once the meat and spices have been mixed and taste-testing is successful, it's ready to stuff into casings.

Making sausage enriches our marriage. (Tee Hee!)

Stuffed and ready to make into links.

Linked, vacuum packed, and ready for the freezer.

Sour food from my garden

I like sour food. When I was little, all I can remember wanting to eat is sauerkraut and dill pickles. (And process cheese and potatoes...) As an adult, sour is still one of my favourite tastes.

Although my garden is quite pitiful, I have ensured I have a supply of my sour favourites.


Gooseberries.

Nasty little sour berries that eventually ripen on some other alternate universe, but never in any garden I've ever seen. Add a little sugar to these babies, though and they're magical. I'm not sure what I'll make with these - maybe some gooseberry pereshki or milch moos if my mom will teach me how.

(What is a gooseberry pereshki, you ask? My mother's rendition is a handheld pastry filled with the tart berries and a bit of sugar. Here is one of my mom's goosberry pereshki, baked fresh:)

Rhubarb. This is the saddest little rhubarb plant in the world, but its presence is comforting. Thank goodness I have friends that have more rhubarb than they can handle.

Sorrel.

The secret ingredient for somma borscht and a tart addition to salads. Every year I buy another sorrel plant, and every year it kind of disappears for different reasons. This year the plant is looking pretty robust.

Non-BBQ Southern Treats

I'm still catching up with the food pictures from our trip, even though we got home over a month ago. I've already posted a bit about the BBQ we experienced down south and my poor attempts to duplicate it.

This trip was not all about BBQ, however... Not by a long shot.

Favourite food surprise of the trip: Hot Boiled Peanuts just outside of Mobile, Alabama

I wouldn't have necessarily thought that hot peanuts would be tasty, but this bag of spicy goobers that we picked up at a gas station in Alabama were FANTASTIC. You still had to sort of crack the shell open, and the soggy, salty, spicy peanuts inside were really tasty. We devoured this bag by the side of the road at 10 in the morning.

Favourite greasy breakfast: Fried Country Ham in Hoxie, Arkansas

This definitely was not a slice from some plastic-wrapped Toupie ham product - this was the real deal. This ham reminded me of my Oma Froese's fried ham- it was swimming in its own grease and it seemed appropriate. Why shouldn't it be swimming in grease? It's HAM!

Favouite Cajun food: Chicken on the Bayou, Henderson, Louisiana

We ate a lot of great Cajun food on this trip, and most of it was fancier than this place, but nothing could match Chicken on the Bayou for freshness or local flavour. It was basically a convenience store with a fry kitchen on the side with about 5 tables where you grab your own beer from the fridge. We started off with these spicy boiled crawfish and some yummy boudin (the spicy pork liver and rice sausage in the foreground) and ended up also ordering a fried seafood plate that included oysters, alligator, catfish, crawfish, shrimp and frog legs.

(And before you get alarmed at our unending gluttony here, remember that you only eat the tail from crawfish! Most of them were smaller than the average size cocktail shrimp.)

Favourite Seafood of the trip: Oysters!

It's hard to decide how I liked them best...it's a toss-up between simple raw oysters on the half shell and the fried oyster po-boy we had in Larose, Louisiana. Those po-boys were absolutely delicious, though...

Most interesting edible seafood: Fried soft-shell crab

I don't know about you, but I found it interesting to eat a crab - shell and all. Yummy. And not too crunchy, either. Jeff also had a softshell crab po-boy in New Orleans. Imagine half of one of these guys in a baguette with lettuce, mayo and pickles. Super yummy!

Favourite 'It's Getting Late and We're Hungry and We Need To Find a Hotel' supper: Spring Hill Seafood, Mobile AL.
We saw this place as we were on our way through Mobile, looking for a cheap hotel on the edge of the city. After we finally found a Super-8, we backtracked into the city to check this place out. It was a run-down fish market that also boiled crawfish and shrimp to order. We got a couple pounds of crawfish and a pound of huge Gulf Coast shrimp boiled fresh for about $12. We then rounded out the meal with some fried dill pickles and some fried catfish from a fast-food fish place across the street. So good! Why don't people sell fried dill pickles in Manitoba? We love dill pickles!

I've left out a lot of great food from this trip. We fine-dined at NOLA and munched on beignets at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, listened to Cajun music at Prejean's in Lafayette, and ate crawfish pie in Breaux Bridge, not to mention the very fine tin-foil dinners we enjoyed while camping. There just simply isn't the space to list it all. This list was mostly about the delectable surprises that were unexpected high points of the trip.

For those of you who'd like to see the non-food highlights of the trip, check out our album:

http://www.froddard.photosite.com/